Binaryjesus

Well, friends, another year has come and gone. In that time, we’ve talked about goals, visualized the difference between a million and billion, discovered new travel hacks and been reminded, repeatedly, that we need to cut down on all of the fees we’re all paying.

But what’s the best of the best? What really encapsulates 2018 for you, dear TwoCents reader? Below is a mix of service, news and commentary. Here’s to an even more fruitful 2019. (And if there’s a certain topic you’d like to see addressed in 2019, leave it in the comments or email me at alicia.adamczyk@lifehacker.com.)

How Much Money You Need to Save by the Time You’re 35

Look, nothing in life is black and white, especially when it comes to your money. We all do the best we can, though many of us certainly could do “better” if we tried. Online guides about how much to have socked away at every age are guideposts, and should be treated as such.

What to Know About Money at Every Age Series

Look at what a hypocrite I am. Just kidding—here are those general guidelines it makes sense to follow. Obviously, not everything lines up perfectly for everyone at every age, but these guides are filled with advice on how to manage every new stage in your life.

Investing Is Risky and Unethical and You Should Do It Anyway

Look, the market’s down and every choice you make seems to implicate you in some kind of human rights abuse, but you just want to be a good person with a hope of retirement. What’s the best course of action? It’s to invest.

When to Count on Public Student Loan Forgiveness

There’s a lot of confusion when it comes to the Public Student Loan Forgiveness program. We have a few different articles that should clear some of that up.

What the Department of Ed’s Latest Student Loan Changes Mean for You

All the changes are pretty uniformly bad if you have student loan debt, and more have happened since this article was published. Would you believe me if I said it’s because Betsy DeVos doesn’t care about you? Who do you think you are, a for-profit college or student loan servicer? No? Then she doesn’t.

Roth IRAs Just Became an Even Better Deal for Retirement Savings

Look, Roths have a lot of benefits, and they’re even better this year, as lower tax rates kick in from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

How to Invest in Legal Weed

I didn’t write this article, but I wish I wrote this article, so there you go.

The Death of the Fiduciary Is Bad News for Your Retirement

Among many of the terrible things happening in the world today, one is that our government is currently rolling back consumer protections of all sorts. And that means you, the consumer, will lose out.

How Does Money Laundering Work?

And if nothing else works out, you still have one option. Just kidding.

C’est tout, TwoCents readers. Happy holidays, and see you on the other side.

Tonight’s comic is a Christmas Lightmare

met-medieval-art:

The Bell of Saint Patrick Shrine by Elkington & Co., Medieval Art

Rogers Fund, 1906 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Medium: Bronze, gold, silver, gems

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/463042

Last year I learned to drive again after a 10-year break. I was surprised how dramatically cars had evolved in that period; I learned to be way lighter on the gas and brake, and whenever I used a rear-view camera to park, I felt like I was cheating. I didn’t learn this: it’s no longer ideal to hold your steering wheel at “10 and 2.” According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a crash you could seriously injure your hands by driving in this position.

Blame airbags, says NBC News, in a 2012 report that recently resurfaced on MetaFilter. They’re designed to protect your head and chest in a crash. But if your arms are too high up on the steering wheel, the deploying airbag can smash them into your face, causing injury. The chemical reaction that inflates the airbag can also injure your hands, sometimes requiring amputation.

Instead, put your hands at opposite sides of the wheel: “9 and 3.” An AAA representative tells NBC News that this position is also more ergonomic in general, giving the driver better control of the car.

Lastly, when you turn the wheel, don’t do the old hand-over-hand maneuver, crossing your arms over in front of the wheel. Just pull down with one hand and up with the other, keeping both on the wheel.

Get with the times: You’re driving all wrong | NBC News

Just a few quick program notes!

I have FUCK THIS ice scrapers again! These are bigger and tougher - they're hollow and layered and should be less prone to cracking!

They also have a baby brother ice scraper. I only made a few ABOLISH ICE SCRAPERS if you want one.

PS: I found some pixel skull scarves that I thought had sold out! They're $15 this week because why not?

lemon out

thedesigndome:

Exquisite Figurines Depicting Various Seasons

New York-based assemblage sculpture artist Garret Kane composed a breathtaking series called “Seasons”, actualizing a figment of his own imagination.

Keep reading

crowtrobot2001:

The two-sided statue of Mephistopheles and Margaretta (19th Century) at the Salar Jung Museum in India. The sculpture is carved out of a single log of sycamore wood. Artist unknown

It's holiday time, and that means everyone is trying to make sweet, sweet cocktails to dull the pain of old family wounds.  Or to enjoy friends and the gatherings with which the season is rife.  Or, of course, to celebrate the solstice and the return of the Old Ones.

Regardless, red is a color of the seasons, and the quickest way to sweeten up and make festive a plain old cocktail is Grenadine.  Sweet, syrupy, and red. This is where people start to go horribly, HORRIBLY wrong.

 

That half full, stuck shut bottle of Rose's Grenadine you've had sitting since last season?  Kill it with fire. Throw it out.

If you think Rose’s makes Grenadine, you’ve been lied to.
Rose’s makes cherry-flavoured corn syrup. Actually, per Wikipedia "The Mott's brand "Rose's" is by far the most common brand of grenadine sold in the United States^, and is formulated from (in order of concentration): high fructose corn syrup, water, citric acid, sodium citrate, sodium benzoate, FD&C Red #40, natural and artificial flavors, and FD&C Blue #1.^[4] In Europe, Bols still manufactures grenadine with pomegranate".

Grenadine should be made with pomegranate juice. I have it on good authority that juicing pomegranates is not worth it and that POM or Trader Joe’s pomegranate juice does a better job. The trick is to get 100% pomegranate juice...but don’t worry; making grenadine is easy.

If you have some Rose’s in your bar, never fear...you can improve it immensely by mixing it 50/50 with fresh POM and shaking the hell out of it. Trust me, the difference is night and day.

You can make grenadine using "hot process" (by heating the juice to reduce it and blend in sugar) and by using "cold process" (by shaking the hell out of it to get the same effect).
Hot process is great, and fast, but can scorch if you aren’t careful. Holds up a little better in a multi-ingredient cocktail. I usually go with hot process. Enjoy.

Hot Process
2 Cups POM
1 Cup Sugar
Splash of hi-proof booze (Let's go with Wray and Nephew overproof rum) as a preservative.

Pour two cups of POM into a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then simmer over medium-low heat until reduced by half. Add one cup of sugar, and stir until dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool; if desired, add high-proof vodka or grain alcohol as a preservative (it also keeps well, and doesn’t freeze solid, in a plastic container in the freezer).

This process produces a grenadine that has a deeper color and a richer flavor. While the cold process makes a grenadine that is fresh and light, the hot process makes a more intensely flavored end product, with a distinct “cooked” taste. It’s still not as sweet as the commercial versions, so you may need to alter the proportions in your cocktail recipes, but the rich, red color is there.

Imbibe magazine grenadine. (Cold process)
2 cups POM (or Trader Joes) passionfruit juice
1 cup ultra fine sugar
2 tbsp Orange Flower Water #
“Splash” (1 oz) Wray and Nephew overproof (as preservative)- shake
like hell and voila, you got homemade grenadine, no cooking or
reduction involved.

# Orange Flower Water is distilled from orange blossoms, and doesn’t taste like oranges at all. You can find it in better-stocked grocery stores, or specialty food stores, especially those with a good Mediterranean section. If all else fails, there’s Amazon. Monteaux is a good brand.

 

Happy Solstice!  "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

Eminent science fiction scholar Lisa Yaszek (Georgia Tech Professor of Science Fiction in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication) has edited "The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin," a forthcoming anthology of science fiction (and scientifiction!) by woman writers from the 1920s published last month by New American Library.

In a wide-ranging interview about the book, Yaszek discusses the historical research she did on the influence women writers had on the field and the ways that their contributions were viewed, and her discovery that the received narrative (women were viewed with suspicion and wrote under androgynous or masculine pen-names to avoid stigma) is at best incomplete and often dead wrong.

Instead, women who wrote under pen-names did so for a variety of reasons -- often because they were prolific and wanted to avoid "saturating the market" by publishing too much under one name; because their employers would frown on employing a writer; or, in the case of Alice "James Tiptree, Jr" Sheldon, because she was an ex-CIA agent and budding psychologist who didn't want to be associated with pulp literature.

Moreover, editors and fans were at great pains to correct readers who mistook women writers for men, and while there was discrimination, it was complicated: John W Campbell publicly said women couldn't write good sf until Judith Merrill sold him her classic "Only a Mother" and then Campbell started to seek out and demand "domestic sf" from women writers (and rejected subsequent Merrill stories because they weren't about traditionally feminine subjects!).

The period Yaszek describes was long before my time, but of course many of these woman pioneers of the field survived and I was lucky enough to know several of them. My first-ever science fiction convention panel (after I sold my first story at 17!) was with Phyllis Gottleib (who later became a good friend); I was mentored by Judith Merrill, who read and critiqued my stories from the age of about 14 on in her capacity as writer-in-residence at the Toronto library she founded, the Spaced Out Library (now the Merrill Collection); I was taught by Kate Willhelm at the Clarion Workshop in 1992 (Kate also became a friend and mentor) and the late, great Kit Reed was a longtime friend and inspiration.

Despite these close associations, I learned plenty from Yaszek's interview, and I've just ordered a copy of her book.

Yaszek: Yes, as I read and re-read all the marvelous (and mediocre, and even terrible) stories that women wrote for the science fiction magazines of the early and mid-twentieth century, I was surprised at how thoroughly wrong we tend to get it when we talk about the history of women in the genre! One of the most common stories you hear about gender and science fiction is that while Mary Shelley is a founding figure in science fiction, other women didn’t really participate in the genre until the revival of feminism and the advent of a distinctly feminist science fiction in the 1960s and ’70s. But as my own and other authors’ research shows, that story just isn’t true! Women have been part of the modern science fiction community since the first magazines were published in the 1920s, comprising about 15% of all authors (that number doubled in the 1970s and remains about 30% today). Moreover, as we see in this anthology, they wrote about the same range of topics as their male counterparts—space exploration, alien encounters, human-machine relations—while showing how seemingly mundane spaces like the home and the classroom could also be sites of technoscientific action and adventure.

The fact that these were women writing all this science fiction was both well known and, for the most part, welcome. We tend to assume that if and when women wrote science fiction before the 1970s, they defaulted to masculine or androgynous pen names to sell their stories to male editors and readers. But of course, as any modern science fiction writer worth her salt will tell you, all genre authors use pen names at times, so they don’t flood the market—and as I learned while researching this book, sometimes men used female pen names! Even more importantly, most women didn’t use masculine pen names. They published as women, and, at least in the early days, editors often published pictures of authors along with their stories, so it should have been clear that, say, Leslie F. Stone was indeed a woman. Additionally, when readers mistook the gender of an author, editors were quick to correct them. Many of those early editors were excited to have women write science fiction. It proved the popularity and importance of this brave new genre—it was so important that even schoolgirls and housewives wanted to write it.

The last thing that surprised me was that while there were indeed one or two famous cases of women writers passing as men in each generation, most of those women made that choice for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the science fiction community. Pioneering science fiction and fantasy author Catherine L. Moore became C. L. Moore in the 1930s so she wouldn’t lose her day job at a bank (something that happened frequently to both men and women with secondary incomes during the Great Depression). Mary Alice Norton became Andre Norton in the 1940s when she launched a career as a boys’ adventure writer, and simply brought that established name with her when she began publishing science fiction (even though she had already been working in science fiction as an editor and everyone knew she was a woman).

Lisa Yaszek: We get the history of women in science fiction “thoroughly wrong” [Library of America]

(via Beyond the Beyond)

You can preorder an Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass for $40.

As Boing Boing pal Morpheus says, “Big Mouth Billy Bass, the legendary talking robotic centrarchidid, is now available with Amazon Alexa support. You can ask it for stock quotes or to order some more Ranch Doritos and blowgun darts!”

The future is weird.

From the Amazon blurb:

• Everyone's favorite talking and singing fish is now programmed to respond to Alexa voice commands.
• Pair big mouth Billy bass with your preferred device in the Echo family and let the fun begin.
• Responds to Alexa voice commands
• Lip syncs with Alexa spoken responses
• Responds to inquiries about the weather, your commute, the news, random facts, and more
• Reacts to timers, Notifications, and alarms
• Dances to the beat with music.
• This is a hilarious gift!

Every year around this time, food bloggers breakout into sweats as ramps begin to make their way into local markets. Recipes for ramp jam, ramp butter, ramps and eggs, ramp pesto and pickled ramps proliferate. Newspapers print lists of ramp festivals throughout the Southeast and insist that you will like ramps if you can get past their stink.

So, guess who’s on the bandwagon this year? In keeping with all things EatBufordHighway, I’ll cut the crap and get down to brass tacks. You’ll either love ramps or hate them. If you only “like” them, you’ll hate them as soon as you find out that they’ll cost you about $20/lb…

These are ramps.

So, why are they so expensive? It’s simple really. Ramps are notoriously difficult to cultivate and most are foraged. Also, it can take up to 3 years before a seed will mature to a harvestable bulb.

These are not ramps.

So, why don’t I go out and find my own? Go right ahead- it’s a free country. But, be sure you know what you’re looking for. While ramps are a lot easier to identify that mushrooms, you can still jack yourself up pretty bad if you make a mistake. Ramps look almost identical to Lily of the Valley. There’s really only one cosmetic difference – ramp bulbs blend from white at the bottom to purple along the stem. Lily of the Valley is all white. The other difference is that Lily of the Valley will kill your ass.

So, how do I know if I’ll like them? Do you like onions and leeks? Do you like garlic? Do you like the idea of those all mashed up into one plant? Then you’ll probably like ramps. I can understand that at that price point, you’d be hesitant to try them. But a handful will only set you back about $3-4, so it’s not that expensive to experiment.

Where do I find them and what do I do with them once I have my hands on some? You should be able to find them a local farmers markets throughout April – I found these at the Buford Highway Farmers Market. As ramps are foraged, don’t expect them to be nice and clean – you’ll find them just as they were dug out of the ground. Expect fair amount of mud and don’t be put off by the mucousy outer skin on the bulbs (it kind of reminds me of a green onion that’s past it’s prime…). Just look for bright, healthy leaves. The leaves are delicate and wilt quickly – if the leaves don’t look good, the ramp is too old.

If you really want to get a taste for ramps, go simple. I simply toss them in a good olive oil and throw them on a hot grill. Keep them moving so they don’t burn – you’re looking to wilt them down and get a slight char. Grilling will bring out the sugars. Off the grill, hit them with a little salt and you’re done.

 

siryl:

“Birds of a Feather,” an eerie acrylic painting by Aaron Jasinski.

This is a comic about NASA's Insight mission to Mars.

View on my website

ALL ABOARD.

View on my website

Tonight's comic wishes it could turn off notifications.

Tonight's comic is covered in blood-for a good cause.

 

Having grown up hearing my family talk about what it was like seeing television evolve into what it is today, it must be even more surprising for a 97-year-old to witness the evolution of the car into “the future” we now know as the Tesla Model S.

Read more...

Three years ago, I dropped $1,000 on a lift kit for my daily-driver, a 1992 Jeep Cherokee. And while I initially loved the way it turned out, I’ve grown to detest almost everything about my new suspension. Lifting my daily driver was a dumb idea.

Read more...

“This design needs a little something…I’ve got it!
I’ll make the letters reflect in the water, and…perfect!”

Sometimes you’re a little too close to your creation to see the problems with your design.

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad here, right now: $0

 

What's that? A FEMALE DOCTOR WHO?????????